Rules for Being a Girl

by Candace Bushnell

  “Thanks,” I say, and my voice hardly shakes at all. “I worked hard on it.”

  “I could tell.” Kalina nods. “What prompted you to write something like that?”

  I hesitate. Well, my AP English teacher kissed me at his apartment doesn’t seem like a great story to lead with in a college interview—but that’s not even the whole reason I wrote it, really.

  “It feels like there are all these double standards for guys and girls,” I explain finally, wrapping my hands around my coffee cup. “In life, I mean, but especially in high school. Once I started noticing them, it was like I couldn’t stop. And it seems to me like before we can do anything—before we can, like, start to undo them—at the very least we need to point them out.”

  Kalina nods at that, jotting something down in her Moleskin notebook. She asks me what I see myself doing after college—journalism, I explain, though I know it’s hard to make a living that way—and eventually the conversation meanders around to living in Providence and whether it’s actually going to snow here later like the forecast says.

  “I hope not,” she says with a grimace. “I’m from Texas, and I’d never even owned a pair of snow boots before I moved here. I’m still getting used to New England winters.”

  “Was it a difficult adjustment?” I ask.

  “I was definitely homesick at first,” Kalina says, sitting back in her chair and seeming to consider it. “And honestly, this campus is pretty white. It’s better now than it was when I was a student, but there’s still a long way to go.”

  I think of the students I saw milling outside—to be honest, it seems a lot more diverse than my high school, and it occurs to me with a jolt how little I’ve thought about that. The same way most guys don’t realize what it’s really like just being a girl, I realize now, I definitely haven’t given enough thought to what it’s like just being black or brown, or speaking another language, or being from another place.

  “I can appreciate that.”

  Kalina nods. “So I think that’s all I’ve got for you,” she says, shutting her notebook and offering me a wide smile. “Here, let me give you my card, so you can be in touch if anything comes up. I’d wish you luck, but honestly, Marin—with your grades and extracurriculars, you shouldn’t really need it.”

  “Really?” I can’t keep the dorky excitement out of my voice. “You think so?”

  “Really,” she says, reaching across the table to shake my hand like a promise.

  Sixteen

  The next day I head over to Sunrise to see Gram. She’s working on the Globe crossword puzzle when I knock on the door of her suite, tapping a ballpoint pen idly against her lipsticked mouth.

  “Granola bars,” I report, setting the Tupperware on the coffee table in the sitting area. “Gracie made them.”

  Gram raises her eyebrows. “Sounds healthy,” she says ominously.

  “They’ve got chocolate chips,” I tell her, settling down beside her on the narrow love seat and breathing in her familiar grapefruit and tropical-flower smell. “You can hardly taste the chia.”

  Gram smirks. “Here,” she says, handing me the paper and sitting back against the throw pillows. “Help me with this. I’m useless at the pop culture clues.”

  I glance down at the puzzle, surprised to see it’s almost all the way filled in already. “Looks like you’ve been doing fine without me.”

  Gram waves her hand. “The Globe puzzle is easy,” she demurs, though I can tell she’s a little bit pleased with herself. “They say it keeps your brain sharp, for all the good that’ll do me.”

  “No, it will!” I say, smiling a little awkwardly. I never know exactly how to react when Gram mentions being sick. The reality is that Alzheimer’s is progressive; she isn’t ever going to get better, or move out of Sunrise and back into her own place. The trick, my mom always says, is to enjoy her while we have her—which, I remind myself, is exactly what I came here to do.

  I open the tub of granola bars—Gram’s right, they do taste a little on the healthy side—and grab the pitcher of iced tea from the fridge. We fill in the rest of the crossword while I tell her about my Brown interview.

  “She basically said I was a shoo-in,” I finish with a grin.

  “Damn right you are,” Gram says, raising her glass in an iced tea cheers. “I’d expect nothing less from you, Marin-girl.”

  “What were you like back in college?” I ask, remembering suddenly what she told me about not having been such a good girl when she was my age. “Were you really a hell-raiser?”

  “I had my moments.” She glances at me over the tops of her glasses. “I got arrested in Boston once, protesting the Vietnam War.”

  “What?” My jaw drops. “You did not.”

  “Why is that so difficult to believe?” Gram looks openly delighted with herself now, her blue eyes bright and canny. “Oh, I swore to your grandpa I’d never tell anyone. I don’t even think your mother knows.”

  “No, I don’t think she does either.” I try to imagine it—Gram with her pearl stud earrings and sensible slacks from Eileen Fisher. “You were a badass.”

  “Well.” Gram breaks a granola bar in half. “I suppose I was. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. It just felt necessary, that’s all. Doing what I could to right what was wrong.”

  “Did you burn your bra too?” I laugh.

  Gram raises her eyebrows.

  I clap a hand over my mouth. “Gram!”

  “Oh, it was the sixties,” she says, waving her hand with a shrug. “No one was wearing a bra to begin with.”

  I laugh at that. “Anything else you want to tell me about this secret life you’ve been hiding for the last, oh, seventeen years?”

  Gram considers that for a moment. “Well, my first protests were during the civil rights movement,” she tells me. “I went down to Washington for Dr. King’s speech, with my church group, but you knew that.”

  “Grandma, I most certainly did not know that.” I gawk at her, dumbfounded.

  “Well,” she says, brushing crumbs off her lap. “I suppose I always felt I could have done more—I know I could have done more, actually—so it didn’t seem right to go around flying my own flag about it.”

  I nod slowly, thinking of one of the essays in Bad Feminist—the one about the movie The Help and how it was a work of science fiction, not historical fiction. I remember watching it with my mom when I was home sick once; I’m embarrassed to admit I thought it was really inspiring, not realizing there was this whole racist narrative about a white lady swooping in to heroically combat inequality, when in reality of course the black women had been fighting their own battles for years and years. The more I read and learn lately, the more work I know I have to do.

  “So what happened?” I ask now, tucking one leg under me. “How come I never knew about any of this?”

  She shrugs, like she’s never really considered it. “Well, Grandpa and I got married. It’s a pretty common story, I think. Your mom and her brothers needed me, and the rest of it . . .” She trails off. “Or that could just be excuses, of course. I guess there’s no way to say for sure.”

  “Did you miss it?” I ask, picking the chocolate chips and cherries out of my granola bar before setting the rest of it down on a napkin. “Like, protesting?”

  “Well, I suppose I was just protesting in different ways,” she says thoughtfully. “Calling my senators, writing letters, donating money to causes I believed in. I was on a first-name basis with the staffers at Senator Kennedy’s office back in the nineties.” She looks at me meaningfully. “I like to think there are different ways of being a rebel. Doing what you can with what you have, and all of that.”

  “Wow,” I say, shaking my head. “I had no idea.”

  “Well,” she teases, “maybe you’re not asking your old gram enough questions.” She smiles. “Better do it now, while I can still remember the answers.”

  I frown. The idea that Gram won’t always be here burns behind my ribs
. “Gram,” I start, but I think she can see that she rattled me, because she holds up one elegant hand.

  “I’m just teasing, Marin-girl.” She reaches out and squeezes my arm, then glances out the window; it’s not quite so cold today, a surprising reprieve. “Now,” she says, clapping her hands together. “You want to go for a walk to the bakery, see if we can get a halfway decent cookie?”

  Do what you can with what you have, I remind myself firmly. “I’d love that,” I say, snapping the lid back on the granola bars and standing up. Gram slips her hand into mine.

  Seventeen

  The girls’ volleyball championship is the following Wednesday, and weirdly people are actually talking about it. A couple of underclassmen have even told me they liked the piece I wrote about the school’s glaring lack of support for the team.

  “I feel like we should make a banner or something,” Dave says, unwrapping his turkey sandwich at our table near the back of the cafeteria. The book club has been sitting together more lately—not every day, but a couple of times a week, which is nice considering Chloe seemingly wants nothing to do with me and otherwise I’ve been spending my lunch period in the library, working on my Title IX editorial.

  “There are a bunch of supplies left over from the pep rally,” Lydia puts in. She’s a class rep for student council and always has the line on extra balloons or poster board or chocolate chip cookies floating around. “We could meet up after school.”

  I nod. “I’ve got my mom’s car today,” I say, smiling, as Lydia offers me one of her carrot sticks, “so I can drive some people over.”

  “No need,” Gray says. “I got us a ride.”

  I turn to look at him. I hadn’t even noticed him coming up behind me, and my skin prickles like it always does when I haven’t had time to properly prepare for the sight of him. “What?”

  He grins, all mischief. “You’ll see. Just meet me out front after eighth period.”

  It’s freezing outside when classes let out, the barren trees waving their branches at the far end of the parking lot and our breath visible in the chilly air. I find Gray with the rest of the book club over by the picnic tables at the side of the building; he is hard at work on a sign that reads, GO BRIDGEWATER, his bottom lip caught between his teeth as he concentrates.

  “What?” he asks when he looks up and catches me smiling.

  “Nothing,” I say with a shake of my head. “Nice sign.”

  “Shut up,” he says, blushing—blushing!—just the faintest bit. “Not all of us can be fancy, clever writer types.”

  “I’m not fancy,” I assure him, though it’s not like I’m mad about it.

  “I think you’re kind of fancy,” Gray says.

  I’m about to reply when a school bus pulls into the parking lot, the driver tooting the horn in cheery greeting.

  “Oh, good,” Gray says, putting the finishing touches on his sign and straightening up. “Our ride’s here.”

  “Wait, what?” I blink at him. “You got us a . . . school bus?”

  “I got us the lacrosse team’s school bus,” he admits, looking the slightest bit pleased with himself, “but there’s a catch.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “We’re not the only ones riding it over there.” Gray nods at the gym entrance, and my eyes widen. The entire lacrosse team is trickling out of the locker room and toward the bus. Well, almost the entire lacrosse team—Jacob makes a point of scowling at me and walking off in the opposite direction.

  “Seriously?” I gape at Gray. “You convinced them to come support?”

  “They wanted to,” Gray says, and I shoot him a dubious look. “Well, okay, maybe wanted to is the wrong way to put it, but still.”

  I laugh out loud as the rest of the club looks on in wonder. Even Ms. Klein looks surprised. “That’s really decent of you, Gray.”

  “Well,” he says. “I think you’ll find that if you get to know me, I’m a pretty decent guy.”

  I open my mouth, not sure how to answer. He’s not who I thought he was, that’s for sure.

  “You guys ready to load up?” Ms. Klein asks, saving me from my own awkward silence. I toss the leftover art supplies into the trunk of my mom’s car and climb onto the bus, sliding into the empty seat beside Gray before I can talk myself out of it.

  The game is at St. Brigid’s, a fancy all-girls’ school a couple of towns over, with floor-to-ceiling windows and state-of-the-art science labs. Gray heads over to the snack bar—an actual snack bar, not the crappy vending machines that are lined up outside our school—and comes back with a giant soda for himself and a bunch of bags of peanuts for everybody. “Are you, like, book club dad right now?” I ask, grinning as he passes them out.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Everybody needs to behave or I’ll turn this volleyball game around, et cetera.”

  I snort, helping myself to a peanut. “You’re kind of a nerd, huh? Is that, like, your big secret?”

  Gray shrugs. “One of them,” he admits, his eyes steady on mine. The back of his hand brushes mine. I can convince myself it’s an accident until it happens again a few minutes later—the skate of his knuckles over my fingers, his pinky nearly hooking with mine. I bite my lip.

  “Gray . . .”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Marin,” he says, exactly mimicking my tone.

  I blow a breath out, debating. It’s not that I’m not interested, obviously. If I’m being honest, I’ve been interested since the day of our first book club meeting, when he fixed the zipper on my backpack in the parking lot outside of school. Or before that, even. It’s not like I never noticed him, always surrounded by admiring onlookers—it’s just, I promised myself I’d never be one of them.

  “You know what everybody says about girls when they hook up with you, right?” I ask him finally.

  I’m expecting him to play dumb, but right away Gray nods. “I do know, actually,” he says. “And it’s fucked-up. I don’t know why it’s anybody’s business. We’re all just having a good time.”

  That surprises me, although probably it shouldn’t. I’m guilty of it myself, aren’t I? How many times did Chloe and I sit around on my front porch complaining about girls with the audacity to kiss boys we had crushes on, or how skanky some sophomore looked at the Valentine’s Day dance? I have to admit, for all of Gray’s alleged conquests, I’ve never heard a peep about him being anything less than gentlemanly to anyone. And I’ve certainly never heard him running his mouth.

  “Anyway,” he says now, cracking a peanut shell and offering me a cheeky smile. “Who says I’m trying to hook up with you to begin with?”

  “I—” Suddenly I’m back at Bex’s apartment: sure I misread the situation, confused his intentions. “I’m not saying—”

  The panic must register on my face, because Gray nudges me gently in the shoulder. “I mean, no, I’m definitely trying to hook up with you,” he admits. Then he shrugs. “But—and listen, I know this is going to sound like a line, and it’s not—I’m not only trying to hook up with you, okay?”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Oh no?”

  “No,” Gray says. “I meant what I said to you. I think it’s cool, what you’re doing here. You kind of blow me away a little bit.”

  I consider that for a moment. I’ve spent the last few weeks feeling like such an outsider, it’s hard to imagine Gray could think that what I’m doing is something cool. “Well,” I say finally, “I will keep that in mind.”

  “You do that,” Gray says, eyes warm and steady on me. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to watch this volleyball game.”

  I snort. “Oh, sorry, am I distracting you?”

  “Yes, actually,” he says, but he’s grinning.

  I can’t help but grin back.

  It’s weird, watching the girls’ volleyball team defend their title—after all, I know it’s just a game. But something about it makes me feel hopeful, and when Elisa makes the winning point at the very end of the final set, the rest of us le
ap to our feet like lunatics, hooting as the ref blows his whistle and the team floods onto the court. Lydia and Dave are slapping each other five in all different configurations. Ms. Klein is screaming like a drunk football fan.

  “Oh my god!” I fling my arms around Gray’s neck before I totally know I’m going to do it, nearly knocking him clear off his feet, and when he ducks his head to kiss me, it feels like the most surprising win of all.

  Eighteen

  Bex hands our response papers back the following morning. I’m so prepared for an A that for a second I think that’s what I’m seeing before I realize there’s actually a bright red D at the top.

  Wait, what?

  I flip the paper over as fast as humanly possible, glancing around to make sure nobody saw it as my whole body burns with shame and disbelief. I’ve never gotten a D in my life, let alone on something that involved writing. Let alone on something for Bex. It just . . . doesn’t happen.

  Except that apparently now it does.

  We’ve got a vocab lesson this morning, but I barely hear anything anyone says the entire period over the horrified roar echoing inside my head. By the time class ends I’ve crafted an argument in my own defense worthy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself, but when I finally make it up to the front of the empty classroom all that comes out is a sputter.

  “What happened?” I manage, holding the wrinkled paper out of in front of me, carefully typed pages drooping like so many white flags.

  “I’m sorry, Marin,” Bex says, looking disappointed. “But this essay just wasn’t up to your usual standards.”

  “Wha—” I shake my head. “Why not?”

  “It was rushed, and it was sloppy,” he says. “It just felt like you didn’t try at all. I know you’ve been spending a lot of time on your editorials. Maybe you’ve been distracted.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I mean, maybe it wasn’t my best work. But seriously, a D?”